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Abstract
Software agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) have grown into a very active area of research and commercial development activity. There are many current emerging real-world applications spanning multitude of diverse domains. In the context of agents, ontology has been widely recognised for their significant benefits to interoperability, reusability, and both development and operational aspects of agent systems and applications. Ontology-based multi-agent systems (OBMAS) exploit these advantages in providing intelligent and semantically aware applications.
In addressing the lack of support for ontology in existing methodologies for multi-agent development, this thesis proposes a design methodology for the building of such intelligent multi-agent applications called MOMA. This alternative approach focuses on the development of ontology as the driving force of the development process. By allowing the domain and characteristics of utilisation and experimentation to be dictated through ontology, researchers and domain experts can specify the agent application without any knowledge of agent design and lower level programming. Through the use of a structured ontology model and the use of integrated tools, this approach contributes towards the building of semantically aware intelligent applications for use by researchers and domain experts.
MOMA is evaluated through case studies in two different domains: financial services and e-Health.